Friday, January 28, 2005

SED - Replace patterns in a file using sed

One of the best tools for editing a stream of characters is sed. In fact sed stands for stream editor. One of my favorite commands in sed is the substitute command. The command syntax is as follows:

$ sed 's/orig/new/' source > dest

The command uses regular expressions and hence orig is a regular expression. The command substitutes all occurences of the original pattern with new.
As can be seen the output has to be redirected to another file. This is because sed sends the output to stdout. To substitute things in the same file, use the following format: